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Venomized #1 Review

I've expressed concern before about the absurd number of Venom events we're getting bombarded with. At this point, I think even the offices at Marvel are sick of it too, no matter how much cash they may rake in. At any rate, this series seems to be the end of it all. Let's see if it can lighten the reception of the poisons. No spoilers here.

If you decided to skip the X-Men / Venom crossover, don't worry. It was about as inconsequential as you'd expect. I'd say you should only really read Venomverse to get the essentials. Even that won't make you love this story, though. Not that it's bad. It's just mostly fan service for Venom fanatics who love to see what everyone would look like with a symbiote. A few misteps come with fan service. For example, the Thing doesn't seem to fully understand symbiote basics. Yes, Ben, I can believe that the symbiote made you stronger than you already were becuase A) that's what they do and B) you're not even one of the ten strongest heroes. You were on a team with Agent Venom, shouldn't you know how this works? I lso think giving Eddie the lead in 616 just becaus he's Venom is weird, but it's not completely thoughtless. As a whole, Venomized #1 is a pretty fun set up with decent dialogue and mostly well written characters. Hopefully Spider-Man will actually matter this time around.

Artist Iban Coello returns from Venomverse to give the Poison saga (or at least the important parts) a sense of cohesive order. His style is super clean with anime inspired poses and expressions, making hi a good fit for an "event" based on fan service concepts. Action is pretty well layed out. Hopefully now that everyone has been venomized, the script going forward will cut him some slack and let him have about more fun. Poisons shooting symbiotes doesn't necessarily mean symbiote characters doing what people love them for. Colorist Matt Yackey brings a surprisingly bright pallete to the table. I'm glad they didn't think, "this is a Venom book, it needs to be DARK and GRITTY". It's contrastly colorful, very fitting for a story about a whole world of superherores.

As you may have guessed, your enjoyment of this depends pretty heavily on how you feel about Venom. It's fun nonsense action that sets up its premise in a solid way. Clean, bright art makes it consistently fun to flip through. Check it out if you like Venom and didn't hate the Poisons. This could be the book to win you over.